


a grief that can't be spoken

by inianuae



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Angst and Feels, Canon Compliant, F/F, Hapithea, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Timeskip | War Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Team Constant Nicknames, honorable mentions go to Yuri Ingrid and Ashe, no beta we die like Glenn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-16 09:41:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29330235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inianuae/pseuds/inianuae
Summary: Hapi and Dorothea didn't get along in their academy days, but here near the end of the war, they've found they have a lot in common, and most of it is heartbreak. Or: what were they talking about, that day at the end of the pier?(Canon compliant for all routes, technically. The only spoilers are feelings spoilers.)
Relationships: Dorothea Arnault & Hapi
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9





	a grief that can't be spoken

The two of them shared the quiet together at the end of the pier for a long time before either spoke, just breathing and watching the sun set over the monastery’s fish pond. As busy as everyone was putting things in order behind them, the rippling water had a way of swallowing the loudest noises, and carrying strange small ones instead—the creak of the windmill across the way, a calico cat dabbing her paws into the far side of the pond, hunting crayfish. The murmurs of the dinner crowd in the mess hall behind them, the soldiers securing crates of materiél for the night, all of it faded into their background as the late summer mist started to rise around their ankles.

Hapi surprised herself by breaking the silence first, eyes bright against her dark face, the green of her heavy cloak gone murky in the growing twilight. “Did you ever think it would come to this, Dorable?” 

Dorothea’s voice was soft, with that lilt of bitterness she often had in the evenings. “What, the end of the world? Maybe. For the last while.”

“ _She_ would say it’s the dawn of a new one.”

“ _She_ has to. Otherwise—”

“All of this violence. What’s it for?”

Dorothea’s eyes welled up in response, and she shivered. Breeze-blown waves lapped faintly against the piles of the dock and the gray stones of the quay. Somewhere, out by the dormitories, someone’s sudden laugh echoed out, or it was a dog barking—without context, it was hard to say.

“It’s…been nice having you down in Abyss. Helping with the kids and the clinic. I know Yuri’s all about it.” Hapi gave her best it’s-okay-to-change-the-subject shrug and raised her eyebrows to make room for a reply. She’d never been great at small talk.

The onetime opera singer looked grateful at the chance, though her smile was still thin and distant. “It’s been nice being there. It feels better than—we can actually—they don’t just run back out and—“ She gulped in a breath, and started over. “I spent most of my time after—after school, helping out, here and there. There were so many people who just needed someone to _care_. It feels more like _me_ , getting people healed and fed. Finding children somewhere safe. And Yuri’s been wonderful, finding all the supplies.”

“Gotta admit I was surprised when you first came on down. Fancy Songbird, all the way out of the spotlight, down in Abyss with us and no marriage material in sight. You never came through, you know, before.”

Dorothea’s throat muscles tightened, shifting the shadows across her collarbone. “Is that why we weren’t friends?” She took a moment to swallow the brittleness in her voice, brows drawing together. “Sorry. I just…grew up in a place a lot like it, actually. Except from my gutters in Enbarr you could at least see the stars, you know? When we were kids I just always felt those ceilings closing in on me, like if I went down there I’d sink down into the earth and never get back up to the sky again.”

“Like someone might just _forget_ you down there?” Hapi’s mouth turned down at the corners, a hard edge to her voice.

It was her friend’s turn to pivot, green eyes wide and apologetic. “I’m sorry. I know. I was—I was always trying to get away from myself, back then. I ran away from people who reminded me of me, too. I wish I’d gotten to know you better, you and everyone. You’ve all made me so welcome, and here I go, running off in my own—”

“No, it’s okay.” Hapi shook her head, dismissing any drama with the simplicity of long practice. “I used to feel buried alive down there too. If I had a way out I would’ve taken it. It felt like going and doing horrible things with our Professor was the only time I got fresh air. But it’s home now. It’s ours to protect.”

Their eyes met, and they mirrored the shy crooked smiles they’d caught off of each other in a field infirmary here, a breathless rescue there, over the last months. _Ours_. The two of them had come such a very long way from their academy days, cutting faith classes neither of them felt like they had any place in and getting hauled into extra choir practice by their professors to make up for it. Somewhere in there, they’d learned to heal, even as the war rolled on and broke them both all over again. 

Neither of them could say who relaxed first, but Dorothea let her smile widen, sincere and soft. “I’m not so afraid of people like me, any more. It just means a lot to help. It’s…meant a lot to get to know you.”

They let the breeze wash over them, redolent with lamp oil and the refuse of the kitchen and night-blooming flowers all together as the monastery settled down for another tense, watchful night. Hapi pulled her hood up, tucking her unruly red hair behind her ears so it would fit. She took a moment to decide whether or not it was worth it to get sentimental, and didn’t quite land on an answer. “I feel like I always used to hear you singing. In the gardens, you know? In the hall with a little crowd all lined up to hear it, at dinner, all the time.”

“And you miss it?” Dorothea tried to sound light, teasing, but she knew what she was acknowledging: _used to_. She had been avoiding all of those places, and the ghosts of the people she had known there, for months.

“No. I thought it was annoying.” Hapi let out an amused snort, and stepped reflexively around the sigh that wanted to follow. “You were always trying to show off for whatshername, that horse girl.”

That got a brief bell of a laugh out of Dorothea, who responded with a feather-light punch to her shoulder. “ _You're_ a horse girl, Happyface.”

“Okay but not like that! She’s a bad as Coco for pegasuses. Pegasi. Whatever. You know it.”

“Her _name_ is _Ingrid_ ,” and this with the all the enunciation and fine posture of an expository monologue, “and she is a _magnificent knight_ , I’ll have you know. And her brave steed’s name is—oh, I can never remember.” Dorothea made a wry moue, and couldn’t stop herself from returning to laughter. Tired, easy, real laughter. “You know horses hate me.”

The laughter was infectious, and Hapi let herself share in it for once. It was hard to keep all semblance of passion in check around such an expressive woman, for all of the practice she got with some of her more ridiculous friends. “Maybe you should sing to them. Like you did for your Maiden of the Wind or whatever.”

“You’ve been spending time with your own brave knight, I see! Have sparks been flying before he rides gallantly off to battle?” Dorothea’s musically teasing tone died away, much as she tried to hold onto it. There had been a time she would crack her voice on cue with exquisite control, to send an audience of hundreds weeping, but now it seemed to happen whether she liked it or not.

The air grew thick and heavy for a moment, and Hapi barely held back a sigh deep enough to summon all kinds of terrible things. “They are brave, our little heroes. But I hate watching them ride off. It’s almost worse than going with them. One of these days they won’t come back and—I’m not ready. I’m not ready.”

It was more vulnerability than Dorothea was used to seeing from the other mage, even after a long night patching up wounded soldiers and refugees or one of the meals afterward, somewhere between dinner and breakfast, where nothing really tasted like anything. She tried to honor it with more of her own. “I used to want to be heard,” she finally shared, quiet enough that her voice wouldn’t carry across the water. “Like the song in my heart would let someone see me, really see me, not the performance, and they’d want to know more. They’d want to know _me_. You know? The way I used to sing, before I got discovered. Before it was for the stage. And then things got so terrible in our last year—kidnapping and murder and the Church sending us off to kill people—and I just thought…maybe that magic, that way I could make people feel things…maybe I could make them feel better. Braver, happier, more hopeful.”

“Singing is nice,” Hapi admitted, “but I never understood wanting an audience. What changed?”

“Maybe I don’t want to be heard any more.” She sounded so small in her devastation, so far from the confidence of movement she showed in the defense of others, fencing with lightning and refusing to yield. “Maybe the—the song in my heart isn’t one they should hear.” Dorothea paused, went distant again, looking out over too many faces she’d never see again. “For a while—when this first started—I thought maybe I could still try. I could call back who everyone used to be, with my voice. If I could tell the right story about us, sing the right song, I could call up their hearts and show them they could still be kind. Could still listen. But now…I get scared that if they really hear me, that—“

“That all you’ll call is monsters?” 

Dorothea fell silent again, but she reached out and took Hapi’s hand—tentative, gentle, and then as though it were a lifeline. “…I just can’t believe that this is how the world is. Doing this to each other, day after day. I can’t accept it.”

Hapi squeezed back. “It is, though. It’s just not _just_ that. It’s this, too.” The stars were starting to come out, high up above the walls and towers, one by one and then by the handfuls, familiar and constant. Across the monastery grounds, the lights were almost all out. Night had always wrapped around Hapi like a cloak, like home, even if, once upon a time, its shelter had been twisted into a weapon and a curse. Somewhere, deep down, it was still the same dark that had nurtured and protected her when she was small, that beckoned her to go out and find a world she never could have predicted. “The world still has you in it. Us in it. All those kids. That’s—“ She shook her head, trying to work out a way to say it that wouldn’t be sappy or false. “Maybe you could sing for me. Just a little. Just quiet.”

Dorothea stood stock-still for a moment, feeling something like all of those nights in the blackout before the curtain went up and the footlights were lit, when there was no telling how the night might go, and not knowing was a promise, not a threat. Then she leaned closer, exchanging held hands for linked arms, shoulder to warm shoulder, and sighed for them both. “Just you and me?"

"Just us. Come on. It's getting cold."

Tomorrow, one way or another, it would be over, and there would be time to feel all the rest of it.

**Author's Note:**

> I originally thought this was going to be a more explicitly romantic scene, but I got really caught up just establishing them as friends first. So, you know, read what happens next how you like.
> 
> We never get to see an actual scene with these two, and they're almost never anywhere near each other in the monastery, except right at the very end on some routes, standing close together on the pier, looking out over the water, and that really caught me. 
> 
> They have so much in common--they're both compulsive nicknamers who use that habit in place of anything like vulnerable intimacy, they both use a show of cynicism to hide soft compassionate hearts, they both consistently call for remembering the value of lives on all sides of the conflict, and they're both absolutely crushed by all the violence of the war phase. They're both attached to half of Team Tales of Chivalry!!! and kind of bemused about it. They both have a gift that, at a young age, got them scooped up from where they were so it could be turned into a kind of power, and it called monsters to them both. (Someday, maybe another fic about how different it is to be Discovered by Manuela than by Cornelia.)
> 
> They're also both the reluctant healers of their groups--they start out weak at it, with Dorothea actively resisting learning it, only to become versatile and vital at it. Hapi in particular looks, structurally, like a healer that got dark magic bolted on--her Crest is basically identical to Mercedes' except for the story-based Disney-princess powers, and she has a fancy faith spell list to match, but joins up clearly only having gotten to use creepy Agarthan attack magic for the last long while. 
> 
> Also, Dorothea's backgrounded arc of going from avoiding all the other commoners to spending all her free time helping out refugees and war orphans just wrecks me, honestly. 
> 
> Anyway, I like thinking of them absolutely not getting along as teenagers and realizing, as grownups, how alike they were all along. I just got hooked thinking of how much they'd have to talk about, basically. 
> 
> Also, let's be real: it's canon that Dorothea likes her ladies buff as heck. What of it?


End file.
